GURPS Dungeon Fantasy… Sort Of

If you’ve not come across this yet, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (DF) is a useful tool for anyone wanting to play GURPS in the Old School vein.

In the last twenty-four hours, spurred on by conversations over on G+, I’ve found a few extra bits that have made modding DF for Whitegrave even easier.

This post is about sharing those discoveries with you.

Dungeon Fantasy

This set of supplements basically mods GURPS to emulate the classic “Dungeon Fantasy” games that it is named for: classic character types like the Cleric, Thief, Wizard, and Fighter (named “Knight” in DF) go down into the dungeon; after killing all the monsters, and stealing their loot, these “heroes” return to crow about their exploits in Ye Olde Tavern.

In fact, on the surface, the books are pitched as “munchkin” gaming – not the most flattering moniker – and an alternative to more “serious” fantasy.

Underneath, however, are some useful tools. Most notably, there are templates for the character types which are aimed at both speeding up play and reinforcing the sub-genre. All good stuff… mostly.

My beef? It’s pretty high-powered stuff for GURPS: 250 point templates are meaty and very capable super-hero-type characters. And that’s where the G+ community helped me out.

Doing DF on the Cheap

Check out the article, “Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap“. I grabbed this because it mods the above templates down to more manageable starting character point values. As the author writes,

“sometimes it’s fun to start out with slightly less competent characters”

Shaking that out, I am pitching my Whitegrave campaign characters at 150 points. This allows us to use the Racial Templates in Dungeon Fantasy Book 3, but then also whack on either the 100-point or 150-point “cheap” templates to model the archetypes.

A quick test to create Goriel Swiftfoot (my all-time favourite Halfling Thief) proved much easier with these options in play. In short, I was able to use the 150-point Thief template alongside the 0-point Halfling racial template. He looks good to go!

Thinking of Whitegrave

With the basic Dungeon Fantasy options in play, I can turn my mind to the custom elements:

There are new Racial Templates to design (e.g. Bruxx, Krixx, Amazon);

There is the question of including higher technology items (such as guns and laser pistols);

..and there’s the question of designing the Techno template to bring Hargrave’s original OD&D character class to my game.

There are some things to leave out too, don’t forget, but that’s a matter for clarification once some players turn up.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities for Whitegrave under the GURPS umbrella. I can emulate the Old School dungeoneering roots of the setting and throw in the Hargravian extras as we go.